MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S.
Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast
During WWII

David D. Lowman

Athena Press, Inc., 2000

David
D. Lowman retired as Special Assistant to the Director of the National Security
Agency after a career as an intelligence officer, during which he received the
Exceptional Civilian Service Medal, the NSA's highest award.He was a major witness before the
congressional committees that in the early 1980s reviewed the history of the American
evacuation of the Japanese-American population from the West Coast during World
War II.

This
book is, in its principal dimension, a compendium of the intelligence
information that lay behind the Roosevelt administration's decision to order
the evacuation."MAGIC" was
the designation given to the United States' breaking of the Japanese diplomatic
and espionage codes and ciphers in 1940 – a feat of the highest magnitude,
since it not only helped immensely against the Japanese, but also enabled the
United States to keep abreast of the highest-level planning within Nazi
Germany, as that planning was conveyed to Tokyo throughout the war by the
Japanese ambassador to Germany.

In
addition to the MAGIC diplomatic cables, known to only a select few at the top
of the administration, there was much additional information gathered through
the more ordinary intelligence processes.Lowman provides copies of the pertinent Japanese cables and U.S.
intelligence reports, making this a source-book of considerable value.

While
the book is almost entirely informative rather than argumentative, it is
motivated by a profound anger over the disinformation given to the American
people since the 1960s about the evacuation.(Most Americans have been given to believe that 112,000 patriotic
Japanese-Americans were "interned" in "concentration camps"
during the war.)Lowman writes that
"the failure of the U.S. government to present the facts involved in the
wartime decision to evacuate the Japanese and to defend the honor of our
country and its wartime leaders is nothing short of an outrage."

He
points to an on-going phenomenon: the funding of "public indoctrination
which portrays a flawed accounting of actions taken in the urgency of
war." $5 million was set aside at the federal level for that purpose, and
Lowman tells us that "California presently appropriates millions of
dollars in support of the ‘official' history of Japanese evacuation."Such continued funding of a skewed telling of
history by federal and state governments and by tax-exempt organizations, all
propelled by politics and ideology, exacerbates a problem that in lesser forms
has long bedeviled serious scholars.When prior generations, for example, have enshrined specific and often
highly partisan perceptions in monuments, cemeteries, and public commemorations
of all kinds, they have promoted a certain "received history."That version has then become the mythology of
the age that has followed.

A
question for Americans today is just why they would wish to perpetuate an
alienated mythology about the relocation of the Japanese-Americans.This isn't the place, however, to review that
issue in its entirety; the author of this review did that in a lengthy article
on the subject in the Spring 1993 issue of this Journal.

Within
the scope of this review, it will be most helpful to highlight certain
specifics:

1.The evacuation was not to internment camps
but first to assembly centers and then to relocation camps.Approximately 30,000 chose to move away from
the camps during the war, taking jobs in cities in the central and eastern
United States, while the rest decided to remain. An actual internment camp did
have to be set up at Tule Lake for those evacuees who were militantly
pro-Japanese (and to house their wives and children, since the policy was not
to split families).

2.Following legislation in 1948, the United
States paid some $37 million to settle claims for property losses incurred by
the evacuees.

3.In the 1960s, militants began agitating for
"reparations." That bore fruit in the 1980s with the creation of the
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.The hearings of this Commission were almost
unbelievably political and ideological.John J. McCloy, who had been Assistant Secretary of War during the
relevant period, was a witness before the Commission, and later wrote that
"From my personal appearance,... I believe its conduct was a horrendous
affront to our tradition for fair and objective hearings... Whenever I sought
in the slightest degree to justify the action of the United States which was
ordered by President Roosevelt, my testimony was met with hisses and boos [from
the spectators]... Others had similar experiences."One of these was Karl R. Bendetsen, the military
officer in charge of the initial evacuation; the booing and hissing prevented
him from presenting his full testimony.He said "I knew it would be fruitless.Every commissioner had made up his mind
before he was appointed."

4.The "reparations" called for by the
Commission eventually cost $1.6 billion.$20,000 was paid to each of the evacuees.These included the 4,300 who attended college
at a number of American universities during the war, the 30,000 who resettled
in the central and eastern United States, the 4,724 who voluntarily returned to
Japan, the almost 10,000 who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the United
States, those who while in the camps "engaged in semi-military drilling
and in Japanese patriotic exercises to the sound of bugles," the 6,000 who
were babies born in the camps, the enemy aliens (not Japanese-Americans) who
had been locked up in Department of Justice camps as security risks right after
Pearl Harbor, and even the several hundred people who had been sent to the United
States from Latin America as security risks.Twenty-nine people declined to accept the $20,000.

5.The relocation was not unique to the United
States."The British removed all
people of Japanese ancestry from Singapore, sending them to India."In early 1942, "Mexico removed all of
its Japanese residents from Lower California and away from the coastal areas of
continental Mexico."At the same
time, "the Canadian government began relocating the 20,096 people of
Japanese ancestry from its West Coast in British Columbia."Interestingly, Canada didn't permit them to
return to the West Coast until 1949, four years after the end of the war.

6.Lowman tells how "in China, Hong Kong,
and Southeast Asia the resident Japanese had sided completely with the attacking
Japanese armed forces.Moreover, the
conquering troops treated all resident Japanese as reunited brethren... In the
Philippines there were about 30,000 Japanese residents on Mindanao Island
alone, almost all of whom appeared to have completely gone over to the
invaders...."U.S. Naval
Intelligence reports dated January 26, 1942, give the detail about how after the attack on
Pearl Harbor a Japanese fighter plane crash-landed on the Hawaiian island of
Niihau, where the pilot and two resident Japanese (one of whom was a
Japanese-American) held the islanders captive until December 13, at which time
the siege was broken when the pilot was killed and the Japanese-American
committed suicide.

7.The Japanese cables revealed an established
plan to use "second generation" Japanese for intelligence-gathering
in the United States.A cable from Tokyo
to Washington on January 30, 1941, said that "in view of the fact that if
there is any slip in this phase, our people in the U. S. will be subjected to
considerable persecution, the utmost caution must be exercised."A cable from Los Angeles on May
9, 1941, informed Tokyo
that "we shall maintain connection with our second generations who are at
present in the (U.S.) Army, to keep us informed of various developments in the
Army.We also have connections with our
second generations working in airplane plants for intelligence purposes."
Cables in August and September of 1941 reported specifics about the cargo of an
American ship and about aircraft production in the factories of southern
California.An American intelligence
report on January 21, 1942, said that "their espionage net
containing Japanese aliens, first and second generation Japanese and other
nationals is now thoroughly organized and working underground."

Necessarily,
the book contains much more.It takes
its place as a major contribution to the literature on the subject, and should
be available to everyone studying the issue.